Academic Southernness as Affective Boldness: A Quarantined Testimonial

• Published in: Space and culture 2020-08, Vol.23 (3), p.279-285
• Main Author: Barbosa, Eliana Rosa de Queiroz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Crises; Personal experiences; Pragmatism; Quarantine; Urban areas
• ISSN: 1206-3312; 1552-8308
• DOI: 10.1177/1206331220938630

This position statement elaborates on academic southernness, arguing its endemic quarantined position in Western and Northern academia. Drawing from the author’s personal experiences, this piece creates a critical dialogue with bell hook’s “choosing the margin as a space of radical openness” (2000), building the notion of academic southernness. Academic southernness is conceived summing Bhan’s notion of southern urban practice (2019) and Hutta’s affective boldness (2019), and is based on prioritizing action (against reflection), embeddedness (contrary to distance), and solidarity (in opposition to critique). Academic southernness is a permanent engaged and grounded perspective and attitude when facing (endemic) urban crisis, summarized by an extreme pragmatism, commonly unfamiliar for those from the “north” and explained by the anthem “act first, theorize later.” Academic southernness is foregrounded in contexts of crisis, such as the current pandemic, by affectively engaging in practices and with practitioners throughout territories of precarity, demonstrating engagement, embeddedness, and bold solidarities.